Revisiting the 'She Doctor' Panic of 1869 | Undark Magazine
“Preston remained unfazed. After another 13 years of persistence the hospital finally gave in again. Now, Ann and her students would test the waters a second time with a new crop of students. And the male students did their best to trouble that water.”
A Blight on Soviet Science | Damn Interesting
“When they were ready to cross the river, the men unslung their rifles and began shooting into the water, continuing for hundreds of rounds. The river was turbulent with the thrashing mass of crocodiles before turning a deep crimson, their bodies floating belly up. Pushing the crocodiles aside with the butts of their rifles, the men waded across the river towards the highlands to complete the aim of the expedition—to collect an assortment of seeds to bring back to their extensive seed repository in the Soviet Union.”
Visualizing History : The Polish System - The Public Domain Review
“The Polish System fixed this: no longer did a student have to create a picture of the world out of words — now global history could unfurl on a grid before their eager eyes.”
A scientist and Dancer | Undark | Arstechnica
“I am among those who think that science has great beauty.” As quoted in Madame Curie : A Biography (1937) by Eve Curie.
“Intoxicating art and, simultaneously, an industrial accomplishment”. Mallarme on Loie Fuller, ”Les fonds dans le ballet”, 1893.
New Light Shed on Charles Darwin's 'Abominable Mystery' | BBC
“Darwin coined the phrase, abominable mystery, in 1879. In a letter to his closest friend, botanist and explorer Dr Joseph Hooker, he wrote: "The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery."
How Modern Mathematics Emerged From a Lost Islamic Library | BBC Future
“The House of Wisdom was destroyed in the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258 (according to legend, so many manuscripts were tossed into the River Tigris that its waters turned black from ink), but the discoveries made there introduced a powerful, abstract mathematical language that would later be adopted by the Islamic empire, Europe, and ultimately, the entire world.”
When Science Was the Best Show in America | Nautilus Magazine
“From the time Peale’s Museum had opened its doors in 1786, annual attendance had averaged more than 10,000 people. Born both of science and art, it was the first true museum in the fledgling United States and the first must-see attraction not only for Philadelphians but for visitors from around the U.S. and the world. The museum’s creator, Charles Willson Peale, saw the museum as a national good.”
How the Elements Got Their Names | Distillations
“There are bright spots. Some of the vignettes, such as that of cobalt, point us to stories we likely would never have discovered on our own. Wothers also provides surprises about what we assume we know. Take polonium, one of the radioactive elements discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie. It’s named for Poland, yes? Marie Curie (née Maria Skłodowska) was Polish born; of course she would name an element she discovered after her home country.”
Fallen - A Robert Hooke Musical | The Royal Society Blog
“To be the lead character of a musical, set against such iconic figures like Newton, Wren, Halley and Boyle, he had to be larger than life. Reading over his correspondence, the voice that came through was undoubtedly that of a genius... but so cocky!”
How Storytellers Use Math ( Without Scaring People Away) | Literary Hub
Dan Rockmore on Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz and The Weil Conjectures by Karen Olsson.
Why Did Renaissance Europeans See Merpeople Everywhere? | Lit Hub
“Europeans found all sorts of monstrous creatures in the Americas. Just as Marco Polo noted a variety of wondrous flora, fauna and creatures in his eastern travels, so too did New World explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Columbus claim to interact with everything from headless men to cyclops to the cynocephalus.”
The Paris Morgue Provided Ghoulish Entertainment | JSTOR Daily
“The writer and photographer Maxime Du Camp wrote that “the kids, who go there as they would to a theatrical representation, call the exhibited corpses the artists, if the exhibition room happens to be empty, they say: The theater is temporarily closed today.”
Primary Sources/ A Natural History of the Artist's Palette/The Public Domain Review
“For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists' colours. Focusing in on painting's primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball explores the science and stories behind the pigments, from the red ochre of Lascaux to Yves Klein's blue.”
Mummies Among Us | Aeon
“For most of the history of European collection of mummies, the primary thing Europeans did with them was grind them up. At first, Europeans ate them – mummies were considered a drug. ‘Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams,’ as Browne wrote.”
Waking Life | Laphams's Quarterly
““Perhaps it would have ended up there anyway. Sharing many of the foibles and fallacies of early psychology, The Psychology of Day-Dreams is far from perfect. Centered and based on the experience of a white male not only in war but also in life writ large, it could be said that his theories discounted and excluded many. “
Darwin, Expression, and the Lasting Legacy of Eugenics | The MIT Press Reader
“As a man of science, he set out to analyze the visual difference between types, which is to say races. While Darwin’s scientific contributions remain ever significant, it’s worth remembering he was also a man of his era — privileged, white, affluent, commanding — who generalized as much as, if not more than, he analyzed, especially when it came to objectifying people’s looks.”
An experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump | Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768
“... the Bird for a while appear'd lively enough; but upon a greater Exsuction of the Air, she began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent and irregular Convulsions, as are wont to be observ'd in Poultry, when their heads are wrung off: For the Bird threw her self over and over two or three times, and dyed with her Breast upward, her Head downwards, and her Neck awry.”
Clamshell Currency | Hakai Magazine
“The thought of having to go for four days without readily available cash shocked Americans. Around the country, businesses began issuing IOU-style notes or ersatz dollars—often called scrip currency—in the form of metal or wooden tokens so that everyday transactions could continue even when retailers couldn’t easily issue change to customers. In Pismo Beach, however, locals turned to a different resource: the shells of the Pismo clam, a large, edible clam once plentiful in the coastal waters of central California.”
How 19th Century Scientists Predicted Global Warming | JSTOR Daily
“But the road to understanding climate change stretches back to the tweed-clad middle years of the 19th century—when Victorian-era scientists conducted the first experiments proving that runaway CO2 could, one day, cook the planet.”
The Doctor by Gerard Dou | Book Excerpt
“The physician, in the act of examining the urine, is depicted in many manuscripts, dating as far back as the early fourteenth century, and the subject becomes still more common among the wood- featured cuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from which period it became a popular subject among artists of repute. Pictures representing the physician, the apothecary or the charlatan in the act of diagnosing the disease of a patient from his urine glass are apparently innumerable.”